Free Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories by Thomas Lynch Page A

washing through the trees on his right and the silver of the moonrise over the lake on his left illumined the track of railway bed before him. It took his breath away, the beauty of it. His chest was heavy. He sighed.
    When Joan’s Princess Mahogany was moved last April, from the stone winter vault to the freshly opened grave, the seams of the boards in the casket lid were splitting where the epoxy had dried in the cold interior of the holding tomb. Condensation, desiccation, extremes in freeze and thaw: Even the best of boxes will eventually rot, he thought. Everything in nature disappears. Harley Flick let Harold bury his daughter’s ashes, the half that he had kept in the house these many years, in the room she never came to stay in, in the same new grave as Joan was buried in. He poured his daughter’s ashes over his third wife’s casket where they filled in the open seams in the lid. Then he borrowed Harley’s shovel and filled half the muddy grave himself before Harley finished the job with his John Deere backhoe.
    When Harold turned off the rail easement by Larry Ordway’s cross, the dog lay dozing in the road at the bottom of the drive and hardly budged when Harold walked by. He’d let his stick go miles back. Turning down Grace Beach Road, on the last leg of the journey, he looked back and saw the dark shape of the dog behind him. It was not barking or bothered or giving chase, just following him at Harold’s own pace, silhouetted by the last light of the sun behind it. He was aware of his heart racing and his breath laboring and the general ache of his body sharpening and the fatigue of the long walk overtaking him. If the dog attacked he could not fend him off. But the dogdid not attack, only followed Harold home, footsore, winded, aching, spent.
    Harold slumped on the bottom step of his front porch, watching the last light pour out of the day and the moonlight widening over the flat surface of water and the darkness tightening all around him. He avoided the impulse to name some stars that appeared in the firmament, or to name some fish swimming unseen in the dark waters, or whatever living things moved in the woods. He wouldn’t be going to Topinabee. He didn’t want a drink. He wouldn’t build a fire tonight. In his flesh he felt entirely quenched. It was enough to let his vision blur watching the water and the moon and to find Larry Ordway’s dog, if Larry was Ordway’s name at all, curled beside him free of menace, watching nothing happen, thinking nothing of substance, void of memory or purpose or expectation. Neither the names of breeds nor the names of dogs nor the names of their owners troubled him anymore. The dog kept watch all night and did not howl at the rising or the falling moon.

Matinée de Septembre
    A ISLING PREFERRED FRENCH press coffee, pinhead oat meal, cymbidium orchids, and Mahler adagiettos. She loved the tiny courtesies—the door held open, handwritten thank-you notes, engraved invitations, a man who rose when she left the table—a thing Nigel had always done. She found an attention to detail assuring: the pilots’ crisp epaulets, the fashionable scarves of the stewardesses. The way Delibes’ Flower Duet was played during the boarding process, to calm the possibly anxious passengers, the little packet with the toothpaste and toothbrush and blindfold and booties, the blanket wrapped in plastic, the headphones, the manifest efficiency of the cabin crew dispensing preflight orange juices, their starched white cotton shirts and blouses. British Air seemed, like all things British, more civilized somehow than the American carriers. Aisling wondered if her sense of it was defensible.
    She settled into seat 51H of the nethermost World Traveler section of the plane with the certain knowledge that even here, in steerage, she would be treated with the same dignity as the balding men and their trophy wives, already on their second cocktails in first class with their personal TVs and